Wednesday, December 21, 2005

To any Bush supporters who happen by. We all want to defeat Al Qaida. The question I ask you is why would you object to Al Qaida actually taking over and running the USA?

I would like to think we agree that Al Qaida is bad because they don't respect human rights, don't respect political dissent, don't compromise with political opponents even when they represent an enormous share of the population, and when they got in power governed without regard to local laws and constitutions claiming authority instead from divine sources which only they could properly interpret.

I look at Bush and I wonder who the bigger threat is. Al Qaida is (even with a dirty bomb or small nuke) at worst a hurricane. An earthquake. A bad disaster. What Bush is doing is the unmaking of America.

I'm NOT saying we should stop trying to catch these guys. That's the straw man Bush has thrown up in his own defense. I AM suggesting - no demanding - that we fight these SOBs in accordance with our own laws and values. I fear that not only is Bush not fighting Al Qaida in accordance with our own laws, he is turning these extra legal approaches against Americans who have nothing to do with Al Qaida or terrorism. How can you support what this man is doing?

3 comments:

I think what RxR is saying is that even though Al Qaeda has done absolutely terrible things--and threatens to do even worse--we still need to try to keep perspective.

In the 1940s, hundreds of thousands of Americans were imprisoned en masse in camps in the California desert. The government fanned the public's fears of Japanese spies and saboteurs infiltrating our country. This fear was used to justify a great injustice to many loyal Americans. Even though the threat we were facing from the Japanese was surely greater than what we face today from Al Qaeda, we now understand this policy was utterly wrong. Too many civil liberties were traded away for too little security.

In the 1950s (the "Red Scare"), tens of thousands of Americans were blacklisted and spied upon by our government. The government fanned the public's fears of Communist spies and saboteurs inflitrating our nation. This fear was used to justify a great injustice against many Americans. Even though the threat we were facing from the Soviet Union is surely greater than what we face today from Al Qaeda, we now understand that McCarthyism was utterly wrong. Too many civil liberties were traded away for too little security.

In the 1970s, Nixon used fear and recent history as justification for a program of domestic espionage and later for over-broad claims of executive privilege... and it turned out he really was abusing power! How can one doubt that the 1940s and 1950s prepared the way for a tyrant like Nixon? How can one doubt that his regime represented a grave threat to our democracy?

As RxR says, history shows we must fight against Al Qaeda in accordance with our own laws and values. Bush's fearmongering is nothing new and his tired old arguments have been refuted by history again and again. Al Qaeda is hardly the only threat to us.